Most Popular e-Commerce Platforms SEO Pros and Cons and Migration Issues

Take a tour through an overview of the most popular e-commerce platforms,regarding Magento, Bigcommerce, Shopify and Volusion. Also, you will learn more about their merits and pitfalls and peculiarities of migration from one shopping cart to another.

4.
Speaker
Yuriy Stakh
MagneticOne/Cart2Cart
Head of Marketing Department at
MagneticOne. Yuriy started his career in
MagneticOne back in 2012 as a Junior
Marketing Manager and rapidly
developed his skills and expertise in
content, social media and search
engine marketing. A year after joining
the company Yuriy was responsible for
all marketing activities of MagneticOne’s
flagship product - Cart2Cart an
automated shopping cart migration
service. And finally Yuriy was promoted
to a Head of Marketing Department
position where his key responsibilities
include strategic planning, marketing
management and public relations..

5.
Speaker
Anna Korolekh
Promodo
Marketing manager and, in past, an
SEO consultant at Promodo. As an
SEO consultant Anna has worked with
large sites of the following niche:
gambling, dating, travel, ecommerce.
Anna is a certified Google Analytics
individual and a regular contributor to
Promodo and external blogs, also a
regular speaker at the webinars.
Currently Anna manages and oversees
all marketing activities of Promodo in
the English-speaking markets: SEM,
SEO, social media, content marketing,
email marketing, events.

6.
Migration tendencies: how
shopping cart popularity has
changed over the last year

9.
Some curious Magento migration stats that are worth to tweet
40% of all e-Commerce migrations are performed to Magento
In the last 12 months number of migrations to Magento increased by 24%
26% of all Magento migrations are actually Magento upgrades

12.
Some curious Shopify migration stats that are worth to tweet
6% of all e-Commerce migrations are performed to Shopify
In the last 12 months number of migrations to Shopify increased by 98%
2% of all e-Commerce migrations are performed from Shopify

15.
Some curious Bigcommerce migration stats that are worth to tweet
3% of all e-Commerce migrations are performed to Bigcommerce
In the last 12 months number of migrations to Bigcommerce increased by 37%
3% of all e-Commerce migrations are performed from Bigcommerce

18.
Some curious Volusion migration stats that are worth to tweet
Less than 1% of all e-Commerce migrations are performed to Volusion
In the last 12 months number of migrations to Volusion decreased by 20%
More than 5% of all e-Commerce migrations are performed from Volusion

41.
Ecommerce platforms SEO checklist:
SEO checklist
1 301 redirects control
2 Control of Titles with full possibility to customize them separately for each page and using templates
3 Control of Headings with full possibility to customize them separately for each page and using templates
4 Control of meta Descriptions with full possibility to customize them separately for each page and using templates
5 Control over pages content, possibility to add custom text to all pages
6 Control over robots txt file or possibility to add meta robots tag to specific pages or sets of pages
7 Control of Alt attributes for images with full possibility to customize them separately for each page and using templates
8 XML sitemaps automatically generated and regularly updated
9 SEO friendly URLs (control over URLs)
10 No duplicate URLs issues
11 Canonicalization of URLs
12 Search firendly navigation and structure
13 Breadcrumbs
14 Blog
15 Built-in Analytics integration
16 Schema.org integration
17 Social sharing (supporting Open Graph protocol)
18 HTML sitemaps
19 Internal linking opportunities
20 Google authorship verification

48.
301 redirects:
• Create & map a complete list of page URLs!
• Only! If for some very serious reasons the above is totally
undoable, consider the following options:
• Download for Google Analytics most successful in
terms of traffic pages and map them in the first place
• Download the most linked to pages report from your
Google Webmaster Tools and map them
• Map all of your category pages
• Redirect top-selling products (E-commerce
performance report in Google Analytics)
• Test the redirects (Xenu, ScreamingFrog (free for up to 500
URLs only))
• Create good, custom 404 pages
• Try to use server redirects if possible and use regex
redirects to minimize the server load

49.
Other precautions:
• At lest for the first couple of months after the
migration keep the content (Titles, H1’s, texts)
the same
• Make sure to notify your customers of the
changes - possible slow load times, structure
and design and other changes
• Make sure to ONLY use new URLs in your
internal linking
• If you have control of any backlinks to your site,
change them to new URLs too
• Think about the internal linking patterns, try not
to change those much too

50.
Other precautions:
• Update XML and HTML sitemaps with new URL
and submit the new one to Google Webmaster
Tools
• Measure your traffic and rankings (at least with
SemRush) before the migration and after
• When you have moved be prepared to fix at
once SEO bugs of your new platform (duplicate
URLs usually)
• Measure and test everything – your conversion
rates, load times, abandoned carts etc

51.
21.3.1121.3.11
Analytics tip:
After migration you can have 2 options in terms of
Analytics:
•Create new Analytics property and start tracking the
new site from scratch
•Use the same Google Analytics code
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template
?uid=wgYGwhy1RtW8aBkj4Z5qfA
Create a Custom report with full URL displayed:

52.
21.3.1121.3.11
Small prediction:
Your organic traffic will decline anyway!
But if you have done everything right and keep monitoring your site’s performance,
organic traffic will be going back during 4-10 weeks after the migration.